Among the major tenets of the Church of Biological Psychiatry is the belief, for there is no evidence supporting the claim, that what is commonly referred to as “mental illness” is an actual disease. Disbelief, to the converts to this faith, amounts to heresy, and they refer to this heresy as “stigma”. The idea is that if you belong to this church, you must believe in “mental illness”, and not to do so is to mistreat people thought to be diseased.

A couple of decades ago, a revisionist and protestant sect of dissident evangelists split from the Church of Biological Psychiatry. This protestant church initially arose around the cathartic and redemptive power of mental health recovery. People infected with the “mental illness” bug were thought, by this church, to be capable of recovering their mental competence and, in many cases, completely so.

More recently, the Church of Mental Health Recovery has evolved into the Church of That Recovery That Is Not Recovery. So many members of this church with the bug, were not losing that bug, and so it became incumbent upon parishioners to start in a new direction. I guess they’d grown attached to it. The feeling is that if the Church of That Recovery That Is Not Recovery continues to evolve in the direction in which it is going, it will eventually be entirely reabsorbed back into body of the mother church, the Church of Biological Psychiatry.

The “mental illness” lifestyle, ironically enough, is equivalent to the mental health lifestyle, that is, it is a lifetime of perpetual treatment for the affliction a person is presumed to have. Accompanying the initial curse of diagnosis (I do hereby pronounce thee “mentally ill”, and beyond hope of remedy or consequence), comes the attendant chronicity. This chronicity, or lifelong path, is a matter of realizing the negative prognosis, or curse-fulfilling prophesy, issued by psychiatrists, the churches priestly caste of sorcerers.

The news is not all bad. Given advances made by the Church of That Recovery That Is Not Recovery, converts are learning to better enjoy their afflictions. Within the limitations of their debilities, the stricken are learning to carve the modicum of a decent existence out for themselves, however beset by hardship and suffering. The key to this silver lining, so to speak, is to be found in total compliance with mental health treatment plans.

If it weren’t for the great therapist who dwells in the sky, the creator of the drug research and development department, the “mentally ill” person, left to his or her own devices, would be lost. He or she would be just one more homeless refugee scrounging dumpsters for a bite to eat, mumbling to him or herself, and irritating business owners. He or she could even be squatting in the city jail for a spell. No more, he or she now can be diverted from that fate to a fate equally inane courtesy of Joe Tax Payer.

Believing in “mental illness”is not the same as believing in mental health. Believing in mental health is not the same as disbelieving in “mental illness”. We could arrange this sentence in all its possible permutations regarding belief and disbelief, and it still boils down to pretty much the same thing. Maintaining a healthy skepticism, while keeping one’s feet squarely on solid ground, creates a stabilizing effect. In a world where Big Foot, Nessy, ghosts and flying saucers still manage to captivate the popular imagination, it’s best to keep a wary eye out for wooden nickels and, one might add, false gods.

I don’t advocate consuming mental health services. I advocate not consuming mental health services. I advocate non-compliance with mental health treatment plans, in fact, as those treatment plans usually consist in little more than drug taking regimens. Those services that call themselves mental health are actually all about what is seen as “mental sickness”. Mental health services are a business then, and the business they are in the business of conducting is the business of labeling, managing, and “treating” people deemed “mentally ill”. True mental stability, if there is any such thing, exists outside of the mental health services altogether, or at least, it isn’t a subject of concern for the mental health, actually “mental illness”, business.

This “mental illness” business that calls itself a mental health business is interested in doing what most businesses are interested in doing, and that is expanding. When you expand your business you add more employees and, to do that, you must take in more clients, therefore, you need more people to assent to seeing themselves as “ill” in the head. Here’s where it gets sticky. As there is no reliable test to prove the existence of any “mental disorder” whatsoever, this determination of “mental illness” is mostly a matter of suggestion and persuasion.

Few, if any,m mental health workers feel that their job is to work for the contraction of their profession. The result of this expansion of mental health “care” is an epidemic of so called “mental illnesses”. “Mental illness” is advancing on physical ailments for the number one position when it comes to the numbers of people taking in federal disability payments. As “mental illness” is mostly a matter of suggestion and persuasion, with a bit of drug induced brain dysfunction thrown in, what we’re talking about is a population of essentially artificially created invalids.

The mental health pitch being in actuality a “mental illness” pitch is a matter of public relations, deception, and advertising. If people talk “mental illness”, runs the ruse, they are doing something about “stigma”. That they are also selling this idea of “mental illness”, and with it, it’s treatment, is not so much a subject of discussion, not by the mental health industry anyway. The result is that the individual identity is lost through a categorical designation, a member of this set of people designated “diseased”. You are not going to get fewer people claiming to have “mental illnesses” by saying, as they are saying now, “It is okay to be mentally ill.”

If it is okay to be “mentally ill” (or to have a “mental illness”), why do we have “mental health” workers? Basically because “mental health” workers have been much more successful at persuading people they are “sick” than they have at persuading people they are “well”. It’s okay to be “mentally ill” because “mental health” professionals have basically failed to achieve positive outcomes in their clients. They have failed to achieve positive outcomes in their clients basically because it is not in their interests to do so. The bread and butter of people in the mental health business is provided by the same people to which they’ve attached “mental illness” labels. Take those labels away, and you also take away your job.

We need a change of thinking in the community beyond the “mental sickness” business to change this situation in a big way. Mental stability, almost by definition, resides in that area outside of the whole field of mental health, actually “mental sickness”, treatment. Redeeming a person from “mental illness” one must also redeem the same person from the mental health system. Mental health is not to be found in the mental health system. Mental health is to be found outside of the mental health system where “mental sickness” is the first presumption. )Reality( exists outside of the bracketed (mental health system). When you’ve got an artificial invalid, the best antidote is a validation in reality. Consider the script of a drama. If the leading man or lady is an invalid, well, change the play and you’ve got a different, that is a vital and valid, leading man or lady. It is my contention that we can change the play, be it tragic, comedic, or romantic, for a number of people, and therefore, change the outcomes they face in life.

Although I have dealt with the Church of Biological Psychiatry at one time or another on this blog, there is another religion in the mental health field that I haven’t dealt with in a major way. I’d like to try to correct that error of omission if possible. The religion I am referring to is the Church of Psychotherapy.

Psychotherapy, the practice at the heart of this religion, is all about talk. It is, as it has been put, talk therapy. I’m not completely opposed to talking things out. Sigmund Freud, an early prophet of the church, was big on insight coming of these talks. Insight that I feel could be used to correct instances of faulty logic, especially when this faulty logic involves spilling your guts to a priest of psychotherapy.

Doctors of this divinity compare very favorably with disciples of the goddess Venus in her most terrestrial manifestations, that is, psychoanalysts like prostitutes charge money for their services. You’ve got an elite doing for you for a fee what any friend would do for you for free, if you had any friends. Lack of friends is a primary reason some people utilize the services of a priest of this religion.

1 in 5 people, according National Institute of Mental Health propaganda, have a “mental illness”. Priests of the Church of Psychotherapy are not as inclined to believe in “mental illness”, a cardinal principal in the Church of Biological Psychiatry, but they do all believe in Psychotherapy, that is, in talk. Most of the 1 in 5 people alleged to have a “mental illness” are thought to have what is referred to as a “minor mental illness”. The Church of Psychotherapy has been more instrumental, it is thought, although this is not universal, in treating people with “minor mental illnesses” than in treating people with “major mental illnesses”.

“Minor mental illnesses” were introduced as neuroses by early prophets of the Church of Psychotherapy. Some of the converts to this religion think, despite the 1 in 5 statistic from the NIMH, that 100 % of people of the world are (or “have” in a more updated contemporary lingo) neurosis. Okay, so if 1 in 5 have been caught, that leaves 4 in 5 running around loose.

Priests in the Church of Psychotherapy have to make a living somehow, and what better way to “earn” your keep than to make your spiritual calling a way of life? That’s right! If 100 % of the people are “sick”, just as the Christian church is fraught with sinners, 100 % of the people would be in need of the services you offer. Good deal, huh, for a practitioner of this faith?

Unfortunately for the Church of Psychotherapy, the Church of Biological Psychiatry upset their applecart with the release of the DSM-III in 1980. Psychotherapy, from the absolute necessity it once was seen as being, by this act was rendered something of a luxury again. The Church of Biological Psychiatry, much more adamant about maintaining the divide between “sick” and well, thinks more drastic measures necessary, and these drastic measures come to you courtesy of the pharmaceutical industry.

The U.S. government has been very successful in its effort to lay the blame for mass violence on pathology rather than individuals. The disturbed individual is no longer an individual. He or she now has a psychiatric label, whether bestowed by a doctor or a newspaper reporter, and thus belongs to a grouping of disturbed people. People with psychiatric labels aren’t their own moral agents goes the ruse. They are adult children instead requiring full or part time professional supervision.

If violence is a matter of pathology rather than choice, fine and dandy, and this pathology is a matter of biology, alright. The thing to do is to catch violent offenders before they violently offend. When his “disease” made him (we’re talking mostly young males here) do it, after all, we’re looking at “diseases” and not individuals. Individuality is not an option. People either conform to custom and law (regardless of whether that custom and law means wearing a suit and tie or a tee-shirt, jeans and ponytail) or they are “diseased”.

Founded using a $1.2 million state appropriation approved this year, the Center for Excellence on Early Intervention for Serious Mental Illness has a goal of identifying psychosis in a fresh way: by taking notice in the earliest stages and providing support before symptoms spiral out of control.

I guess they think that by busting pre-psychotics they will be preventing psychotic mass murder in the long term. The problem I see with this plan is that you don’t have a psychotic “until symptoms spiral out of control”, and my understanding is that the majority of pre-psychotics don’t go psychotic, and so, by targeting them for treatment, one could be acting in a causative rather than a preventative fashion.

[University of Maryland child and adolescent psychiatrist, Gloria] Reeves and her colleagues say they’re working to ensure patients can live normal lives by short-circuiting the possibility of a deeper psychosis that could intensify if left untreated.

When a patient is already a patient, hey, what have you got? Shallow psychosis or pre-psychosis? In which case prevention is a matter of preventing deep, “deeper” ,or what is known in the trades as ‘full blown’, psychosis? My point is that maybe sometimes it is better to completely prevent the problem by eliminating the doctor patient relationship in its entirety first. Labeling a person “disordered” is the way you make a mental patient. Once a mental patient has been made, and is being subsidized by the state, unmaking a mental patient, unburdening the state of the financial expense, becomes a major problem in itself.

A growing body of research over the past two decades, however, has shown patients are much more responsive to treatment if they’re diagnosed early, and there are early warning signs that suggest when a person is at risk for developing psychosis.

Patients again. If we have more psychosis, but more treatment compliant psychotics, are we 1. upping the number of over all patients labeled psychotic, or 2. lessening the number of disturbed mass gunman in the nation? My feeling is that we are certainly doing # 1 while it is entirely questionable as to whether we’re getting anywhere with # 2. Next question, do we really want a larger population of psychotics in the nation?

Before you think that the impetus for this measure is entirely medical, let it be known that the funding for this initiative was voted in by the Maryland General Assembly at the prompting of Governor Martin O’Malley. Mental health treatment then is the state of Maryland‘s answer to massive acts of violence. Of course, this is providing that they’ve got the right suspects, uh, I mean patients, and that pre-psychosis leads to psychosis which, in turn, leads to massive acts of violence. I don’t even think that is a great theory on paper, but Maryland is not the only state that sees the answer to extreme violence in the nation as a matter of increasing the amount of oppression directed against people with psychiatric labels.

My virtue was that I never made a good little “mental patient”. Compliance with a treatment plan, such as adhering to an irritating brain-numbing drug taking regimen, in other words, was never my forte’. When “mental patient’ isn’t your goal in life, it’s hard to become a conscientious “consumer of mental health services”. “Consumer of mental health services” in today’s parlance translates “chronic mental patient”. The person who refuses to “consume mental health services” isn’t a “mental patient”.

Not being a conscientious “consumer of mental health services”, from the beginning I was looking for an escape clause. Prognosis, you will notice, here would be a matter of living down to expectations. “Mental illness”, after all, is all a matter of applying the odd man, odd woman, out school of philosophy in practice. This means that there are no good prognoses in the mental health field, only calculated curses of a sort. “Mental illness”, then, by definition, is a matter of being launched on a failure track.

I don’t like losing any more than the next person, and so I found this loser track to be somewhat distressing, to say the least, and what’s more, I didn’t think it was the right track for me. What could I do? First you’ve got the diagnostic tag, “mental illness”. Then you’ve got the role, “mental patient” or “consumer of mental health services”. The tag and the role have been supplemented by the recovery approach to treatment. The recovery approach to mental health treatment sees recovery as a journey without a destination. In other words, the patient is expected to recover in the sense that he or she is not expected to recover.

Okay. If you don’t want to be a “chronic mental patient”, you’ve got to stop “consuming mental health services”. This was a little easier for me than it has been for some other people. This is because the better part of “mental health services” is something called “medication management”. That’s right. “Mental health treatment” in today’s world is all about treatment with psychiatric drugs. Those drugs are the primary ingredient in the services that “consumers of mental health services” consume. Stop taking psychiatric drugs, and you’ve ultimately slipped the butterfly net. There is nothing left to mental health services but endless talk.

I have to backtrack a little bit here. Outpatient services are a blast in the most ridiculous way. In fact, everything about outpatient services is ridiculous. Take vocational rehabilitation. You’ve got people pretending to be working for no pay. People expected to never hold down a real job do this thing where they go through the motions day after day. They do everything, in fact, but go to the employment agency and fill out a form. This is the difference between a patient and a non-patient. Non-patients are a little less serious about the matter, and they have managed to become the masters of filling out employment applications.

Given pervasive discrimination, don’t let me bash networking. The clown takes his or her costume off, and he or she still desires something of the human touch. The network is full of imposters, double agents, and swindlers, but to say so would be to hazard a diagnostic label and, frankly, I’ve had enough of that racket. Which brings me to the point. Psychiatry and prescription dope peddling are organized criminal activities as far as I’m concerned. I’ve heard of one instance where the Rico Statute was used against a pharmaceutical company. I hope to see more such realistic moves and appraisals being made in the future.

NBC newscaster Brian Williams has been making irrational claims about Cleveland multiple kidnapper and rapist Ariel Castro. Brian Williams suggested Ariel Castro had a “mental illness”. Could it be that Brian Williams has a “mental illness”? This has got to be “delusional” thinking on his part. Do you think maybe it runs in his family?

So when she [Candy Crawford, director of the Central Florida Mental Health Association] tuned in her favorite national news anchor Thursday — NBC’s Brian Williams — she was horrified. Opening his newscast with the sentencing hearing of Ariel Castro, who held three Cleveland women captive for a decade, Williams called the kidnapper and rapist “arguably the face of mental illness, a man described as a monster.”

“Mental illness” and monster equals a man possessed. Does this describe you, Brian Williams? We just have no way of calculating how many people have been gunned down by the news, and it is news these days, hardly impartial, that is paid for by big multinational corporations with many hooks in what news is considered newsworthy. This is something for a person to think about the next time he or she takes an advertising break from the evening news broadcast to visit the frig.

As Ms Crawford puts it.

“When people hear these types of comments over and over, especially from someone so influential, it can sway their beliefs,” she says.

NBC did apologize, but executives and staff are probably still wincing over the public reaction.

For its part, NBC issued a quick reply. “Brian immediately realized his poor choice of words, and he updated the broadcast to omit that phrase for later feeds,” said spokeswoman Erika Masonhall. “We sincerely apologize for the unintended offense caused by these remarks.”

Maybe it’s time people pay more attention to how many news shows are sponsored by drug companies. The USA and New Zealand are the only countries on earth that allow direct to consumer advertising for pharmaceutical products. If it’s not “restless leg syndrome”, it’s “erectile dysfunction”, or any number of other ailments, many of them highly questionable in nature. Then there are the happiness pills that are known to be ineffective, and to give more side effects than they give happiness. As it is doctors who do the prescribing, the advertising should be going to doctors. Outlaw direct to consumer advertising, and you will also clean up many slips of the tongues made by newscasters who are presently, consciously or not, complicit in the legal drug trade.

June 26 around the world is observed as an International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. One form of torture that is not widely recognized is non-consensual mental health treatment. Both the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International have been slow to recognize the brutal cruelty and abuse of forced psychiatry for what many who have endured forced psychiatry know it to be, torture. The United Nations has been a little more receptive on this issue. On March 3rd of this year the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture issued a statement calling for an immediate ban on all forced psychiatric interventions.

How are forced psychiatric interventions torture? Just do a little bit of critical thinking and independent research on the subject, and you will find out how. People are abducted, imprisoned, thrown into solitary confinement, poisoned, physically restrained, chemically restrained, shocked, induced to have seizures, injured, neglected, etc., etc., all in the name of therapy. Without mental health law serving as a contradiction to criminal law these atrocities would not be taking place. This ill treatment constitutes torture. The aim of this torture is to elicit behavior that the state finds acceptable, to suppress behavior that the state finds unacceptable, and to get the torture victim to admit to having a “mental illness” regardless of whether the victim has an actual illness or not.

Should the victim of psychiatric forced treatment not confess to having a “mental illness”, he or she is then said to be “sicker” than the victim who does confess to having a “mental illness”, and this denial, and/or alleged “co-morbid condition”, is then seen as grounds for further tortures and a lengthier imprisonment. More recent developments in psychiatric torture include what is termed a ‘treatment mall’. This ‘treatment mall’ is actually a reeducation camp and brainwashing center run by the state “hospital” with the aim of churning out a greater number of victims complicit in their own torture and victimization.

We call on people around the world to come together over this issue of forced psychiatry, and to help us put an end to this crime against humanity, once and for all. We would like to see a mental health system in which all patients were voluntary, and in which no patients were held prisoner against their will and wishes. We would like to see mental health facilities that were not psychiatric prisons, but instead were facilities in which clients were free to come and go as they so please and choose. Non-consensual treatments, both inpatient and outpatient, are assaults on the health and the freedom of the species and, therefore, not to be tolerated.

By standing together in solidarity with our brothers and sisters, fellow human beings, victimized by this practice, we can and will bring it to an end. On this day consider what you might be able to do to help your brothers and sisters tortured by forced psychiatry. Although we have been granted the right to receive psychiatric treatment, unlike in any other branch of what purports to be medicine, we have no legal right to refuse such treatment. This right needs to be acknowledged and enacted into law. By joining with us in this struggle, you can help us liberate people from psychiatric slavery–the mistreatments and tortures that have oppressed so many for so long.

There is a better world waiting for us just around the bend. This better world is a world in which people are not oppressed and mistreated by greedy, arrogant and power-crazed traitors to their species. We will not reach this better world unless we make an effort to do so. We have in many nations of the world ended the practice of chattel slavery. We need to end the practice of psychiatric slavery as well. When we do so, we will be that much closer to the better world for one and all that we have envisioned. Now that we’ve gone there in our heads, we need to take a first few actual steps in that direction. Offering support for victims of the torture that coercive psychiatric interventions entail, in their effort to end that torture, is one of the ways in which we may thus progress.